Thanks for the heads up on the maxlength, any help on the formatting. I have seen references to the maskededit.control, string.format and cannot seem to find an easy way to display format, without parseing the string, nor create an input mask. All help appreciated. JohnR

In VB you probably need an instance of the Acrobat View instantiated before calling the file. In vb.net, I just had to address this. Really the simplistic approach is to hyperlink to the filename.pdf file and it will open in your web form window...kind of automagically. I wonder if anyone can tell me a way to have it open in it's own window, or web form without writing javascript with a new window event firing...I mean open a second web form while keeping the calling web form open??

I cannot see where the validator controls allow me to validate a string length. I can enter too many characters in the control and the results cause my sql to hit the 'Catch' ....also having a hard time finding reference to formatting strings like social security numbers, phone numbers and etc. Date is handled with the date options well but can't seem to comprehend how to do a custom format of a string?? All help appreciated. JohnR

Thanks for the response. When I used the ddl and added items to the collection in the properties page I had no problems which only added to the confusion in trying to bring a value out of the ds and display the corresponding row in the ddl. So that I understand.... When I was using the findbyvalue or findbytext...I was 'probably' finding...but not setting the selectedindex to the indexof the 'found' row ? And I will presume that a variable of string, or long, can be inserted as the object of findbytext, or findbyvalue ? I will try it later this afternoon...and when it works, even though I am a non smoker, you would have my vote for KING!

I have code that populates a dropdownlist control from a dataset. The dataset has two fields; one I assign to 'text' and one to 'value'. This all works great. My pull down list functionality works as advertised. PROBLEM is when I open the page, I populate all the controls with the value from the record that the page is displaying...The ddl value is assigned to the control in the code which loads the contols (witnessed by stepping throught the code, but the value that gets displayed in the Dropdownlist is always the 0 index item (first one in the dataset) and not the value assigned to it in the code assignments of the data record. I have tried assigning the value from the data table to a variable and then 'findbyvalue = to that variable', but no luck. I have searched the high seas for references to the use of the ddl, which funny enough seems to be elusive. For such a valuable/oft used control,in VB GUI, I would hope to find something that addresses the full use of the control . I mean 4GuysFromRolla did a million part series on the datagrid, but not even a page on the ddl? can anyone help me ? I am getting my dataset from the global asa and populating the ddl If Not IsPostBack Then dsCBO = Application.Get("dsPhysCBO") Me.ddlPMD.DataSource = dsCBO Me.ddlPMD.DataTextField = "PhysLast" Me.ddlPMD.DataValueField = "PUID" Me.ddlPMD.DataBind() no problem! I get a datareader to populate the fields on the form and assign the stored value to the ddl Me.ddlPMD.SelectedItem.Value = reader("PriMD").ToString At this point (stepping through the code) value="PriMD" still no problem. I try to place the index of the ddl to the value passed in using a variable populated with "PriMD" a string myKey2 Me.ddlPMD.Items.FindByValue(myKey2.ToString).Selected = True When the page displays...the text displayed in the ddl is that for the first item in the ddl dataset, not the text corresponding to the value of myKey2 Where do I error??? JR